Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll: How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens

TWO
Last night a Strategic HR Initiative saved my life

Past the church gates, past the old Methodist chapel, up through the Tofts and out between the fields of beet. Past the small shed in the woods that acts as the hub of BT’s broadband activities in the area; down the hill through the woods to the junction with the main road that will take me into town.

I’ve lived in three places in Britain: Essex, with my mum and dad; London, in a flat underneath a man with an enormous toilet; and here, in this small and friendly corner of Norfolk. It’s here that I truly feel at home, in this place that’s impossible not to love, in countryside and a community where I truly belong. Where I have my friendly neighbours (Big Andy, Short Tony, etc.), my close family (the LTLP) and – perhaps for the first time in my life – true and unconditional membership of a youth tribe (bowls). DJ Ken Bruce asks a question on the radio, the answer to which is clearly ‘Norman Greenbaum’.

Past the gates of the old airfield, up the gentle hill towards the old service station. The sunshine washes across the fields and hedgerows and the music fills the car. I’d say that it was the sort of morning that made it impossible to have a worry or a care in the world about life, if I weren’t so worried and full of cares about life and – specifically – the morning ahead itself.

I park the car and slowly walk up the street towards my appointment. It’s a nice day, but let’s not get complacent. It’s at just these sorts of moments when life has a habit of hitting you in the face with a hammer.

I am hit in the face with a hammer.

I recoil from the shock and surprise. Not being complacent is one thing, but it is fair to say that I was not expecting anything quite so unpleasantly literal. The man hits me in the face again. Boff.

It is not a nice feeling, not a nice feeling at all, and improves not one jot when he repeats his assault twice more.

At some point, I tell myself, I should say something. He does seem pretty competent, and I get on with the chap reasonably well (although perhaps less so now, seeing that he is hitting me in the face with a hammer), but truth be told it is an unpleasant experience and I would like him to stop.

‘Diss crown is priddy impossible to shift,’ he explains, in a South African accent. ‘I hev tried wiggling it with dee pliers. Now I am hitting it with diss hemmer.’ He bashes my tooth with his hammer once more, to emphasise the point. Boff.

Randy Newman wails from my MP3 player. Unfortunately, I have absent-mindedly selected the wrong ‘genre’ in my haste for musical distraction, and instead of uplifting and rousing cheerful pop music, my head is filled with mournful minor-key reflections on losers and low-life tragedies in the medium of the blues, whilst I am being hit in the face with a hammer.

The anaesthetic seems to have made my face swell up, as if somebody has pushed a marble into my mouth and under my top lip. They may well have done. Or perhaps it is a snooker ball. It certainly feels the size of a snooker ball. It could be a penis, for all I know. I have my eyes firmly shut. I do not wish to open them as the hammer is unpleasant enough as it is without watching its descent. I can’t believe that it is a snooker ball – what dental purpose would that serve? I also do not think it is a penis, as he would not be hammering it so hard if so.

The only really good thing about a dentist putting his penis in your mouth and starting to hit it wildly with a hammer whilst you are under local anaesthetic and have your eyes firmly shut and are listening to mournful Randy Newman songs is at least you know that you will get offered some mouthwash afterwards.

‘It’s coming,’ he explains, not entirely reassuringly.

The sterilising machine in the corner of the dental surgery starts up with a big ‘whooooosh’. It makes me jump, but diverts me momentarily from the hammering, and from Randy Newman, who has just finished singing a verse about a girl who stole his car and went on to cause a traffic accident, running over a man named ‘Juan’. Randy Newman sounds particularly extra doleful about this; he has no car, and undoubtedly his insurance will be affected. The ‘whooooosh’ is presumably steam, but sounds remarkably like an enormous toilet being flushed.

Adam’s enormous toilet was, due to a quirk in the architecture of the London flat conversions, situated directly above my face.

This is what it had sounded like anyway when I lay sleeplessly in bed, my stare fixed on the ornate ceiling, marvelling at the noises that could be made by a simple item of plumbing. Whooosh! it went. Rushhhh! Sloshhh! It is virtually impossible to describe to somebody who has never lived in a converted Victorian house just how loud the noise of a man weeing in the flat upstairs can possibly be. Cities are never quiet, but the background noise will fall to a dead silence when set against the watery rumble of half a pint of urine hitting the base of an enormous toilet bowl over one’s head. The roar of the main stream, the sonically perfect echo of each single salty droplet as it splashed back against the rim.

Sloshhh! Slossssshhhhhh!

I had been on friendly terms with Adam. He was an amiable man who tended to keep himself to himself, but would always be up for a cheery ‘hello!’ as we passed on the stairs. Living on his own, his habit was to go to the pub each evening, returning at around midnight to start weeing.

I would lay in bed listening to the performance, work anxieties surging around my head. Beside me, the LTLP would snore gently in her anxiety-free woman’s world. As the weeing tailed off, the noises of the city would gradually fade back in: some drunks shouting, the clatter of freight on the East Coast line, perhaps somebody trying to steal my car. And then forty minutes or an hour later, the weeing cycle would begin once more.

Sloshhhhh! Slossssshhhhhhh!

Boff. Boff.

Another couple of bashes with the hammer brings me back to the present day.

The music fills my head to bursting point. Piano, bass, slidey guitar. As each chord hits home, I concentrate hard on trying to envisage myself playing it; the shape of my left hand across the strings, or the sensuous womanly caress of a minor seventh on the ivories. It is not enough to dismiss the hammering stuff, no matter how I want it to. Boff. I blink to myself. Why am I here? Why the bloody hell am I here? The hammer pauses for the gap between songs and then starts up again in earnest.

Why am I here?

Boff boff boff boff.

Why the bloody hell am I here?

Boff the boffy-boff boff boff boff.

Why the…and more to the point, how is this man hacking into my own personal inner monologue in order that he can hammer in perfect time with it? I give him an angry look from behind my protective goggles.

Why am I here?

Boff boff boff boff.

Why am I here? Here in Norfolk, pressed rigidly down into a dentist’s chair, being hit in the face with a hammer.

Lots of reasons.

The little picture reason is that I have a toothache; an abominably bad toothache that crept up on the roots of my incisors; a toothache that has lingered like a man in my area who has come round to give me a free consultation and a no-obligation quote.

The medium picture was the Harringay Station Herd, and the fact that my life seemed to consist of: wake up, fight my way to work, work, come home, listen to man weeing.

But the big picture was all to do with Strategic HR Initiatives.

Strategic HR Initiatives. The foundation stones of modern business. The management engines that are so vitally important to ensure that the companies of UK plc can innovate, thrive and come out clear winners in the global war for talent. There is nothing as pathetic as a moribund stuck-in-the-past company, doomed to hostile takeover, bankruptcy or a slow slide into sales oblivion because of the absence of great – or the implementation of poorly thought-out – Strategic HR Initiatives. That is why we must have them. And just as these initiatives invariably transform the fortunes of the smallest partnership to the most major conglomerate, so they have profound effects on individual employees.

This is what happened to me. Admittedly not quite in the way that was intended, but there you go.

I guess you would say that I had been quite successful in business alongside the musical accomplishments. Admittedly I hadn’t actually started any businesses, or employed any people myself, nor had I spotted an idea that had become really really big and had led to my share capital becoming millions of pounds overnight. However, I had managed to get paid every month without killing anybody or provoking employment tribunals or bringing the company to its knees by confusing ‘Press F1 for Help’ with ‘Press F8 to Delete Exchange Server’ on the IT system.

I just wasn’t entirely happy.

Modern, bland, large, rectangular. I was in a meeting room dominated by an impressive glass boardroom table – an artefact that had been hand-picked by somebody who knew the vital importance in business of impressive glass boardroom tables. I loitered at the back, nervously crushing and reforming my plastic tea beaker, thinking that perhaps I should be taking a more visible position with the other management types.

Dusty windows watched out across the City of London towards the bowling green at Finsbury Square – this was no glamour view, however, but the rooftops of low-rise rented office accommodation: fire escapes and heat extraction systems. Occasionally during a meeting I would identify the pipework of a particularly interesting heat extraction system and follow it around as far as my eye would go. It was a bit like examining the fantastic exhausts of a spaceship in the year 2508. The air shimmered above it, like on Venus.

Inside, we had no heat extraction system. The space was close and humid; there were too many people present. The lift was broken again – a succession of bodies staggered in, loosening ties with the sweat of a six-floor climb.

A succession of board-level speakers had lined up to intone to the room. This happened every week, as a way of motivating people for the days ahead. Words and phrases lumbered through the thick air towards and past me; some clung exhaustedly to the wall behind, some expired and slumped in defeat to the nylon carpet. It was, to all intents and purposes, a perfectly normal Monday morning.

And then, out of the blue, I had started to catch some of these words. And the interminable speaker of the moment drawling in a monotone as turgid as the very turge itself:

‘La la la la la la la know that we are all genuinely excited about this new Strategic HR Initiative that we’ve been working on.’

I gaped at the man. The words churned round my head as I tried to grip hold of them. And as the phrase settled down inside me I looked around the room and, to my horror, saw a sea of nods of interest and concentration and enthusiasm and thoughtful assent. Left, right, left again. Nods – genuine nods. And the fear gripped me, with the icy fingers of a creeping Gantt chart. These people were not pretending; this was no sham for personal corporate advancement, no calculated sucking-up to the powers-that-be.

I was in a room with people who were genuinely excited about a new Strategic HR Initiative that was being worked upon.

It was alarming. My eyes darted round the room looking for exits. I was too far away from the door. They would catch me and wrestle me to the ground and beat me and inject me with the Strategic HR Initiative serum that the others had been given. Catch me! Catch me and inject me! Tape an institutional hub across my eyes and force delivery outcomes into my anus. Brandishing photographs of Harringay Station and massive tubes of Toilet Duck.

That’s why I’m here.

Randy moves on a track.

If that’s why, what’s how?

How did this major change happen? What coup did I pull off, what stroke of daring, what gamble did I take with my life, risking it all on the throw of one die for the sake of a new horizon? Like a frontiersman of the early days of the American nation, what was in my mind as I grimly stowed a rifle and provisions in the wagon, pulled my woman close to me and explained that – for all the dangers, the unknowns, the immense hardships – sometimes a man has to strike out and face these, in order to carve a new life from the dust and rock?

‘I’ll expect dinner when I get in every night,’ said the LTLP. ‘A proper one.’

Sexual equality has come a long way in a very short space of time. For thousands of years there were very clearly defined roles for the genders: the men would do the fighting and hunting and making the decisions etc., whereas the women would do the stuff at home and have babies. Then, from the sixties onwards, society entered a period of hypocrisy. This was when women were ostensibly given the same opportunities as men, but thwarted at every turn with casual sexism. Meanwhile, blokes still would not get involved with domestic chores.

It is impossible to say why the final sea-change occurred: perhaps it was the sudden nineties surge in the average male’s confidence about their sexuality, perhaps it was the advent of The Vicar of Dibley on BBC1. But we are happily out of the sexist Neanderthal period, and it is not unusual at all now for men to do women’s jobs like housework or cooking. Twenty years before, options simply wouldn’t have been available to me, and I would have been forced to remain a stressed, insomniac, on-a-downward-spiral putting-a-brave-face-on male provider. But with a flash of fortune, I was the beneficiary of a second sexual revolution.

I became a househusband, and I’m not ashamed.

(‘Househusband’ is not quite the right word, as it is a bit effeminate. But it will do as a short-term description.)

So that was it. I shed the trappings of Neanderthalism and stepped bravely into my own corner of twenty-first-century post-Dibley Britain. The LTLP took her massive and important new job in the east of England, and I took my huge leap of faith. I packed up, I handed in my resignation. We said goodbye to friends, goodbye to Harringay Station, goodbye to meeting rooms and motivational addresses, goodbye to Adam in the flat upstairs with his enormous toilet.

And, gobsmackingly, I said goodbye to the band.

Taking my last few big gulps of choking, Strategic-HR-Initiative-polluted London air, I had felt joyful for the first time in a decade. A stressed businessman, with all the trappings of success but with no time or energy to make the most of them, I was downshifting to the countryside to enjoy a better quality of life. Truly, it was a unique step that I was about to take – a pioneering move that I couldn’t believe that anybody else had ever thought of, ever.

‘You won’t know it…I’ll be right behind you…don’t try and run away…’ There should be an emergency Randy Newman button on MP3 players for just this situation. You would press it and it would immediately leap to something cheerful by S Club Seven or the Proclaimers. ‘Little girl…wherever you go…’

The dentist now has my tooth by the pliers, gripping the crown and pulling and wiggling hard. It is like a surreal silent movie. I half expect him to put a boot up against my chest to aid leverage, or to use the pliers to pull my head back and forth exaggeratedly, bashing it alternately against the mouthwash basin and the headrest. I would laugh, except he is pulling my tooth out with pliers having hit it repeatedly with a hammer.

A few more yanks and my old artificial tooth thing is no more; I have a huge gap in my mouth that is dripping pus and blood along with an unidentified fragment of metal that appears to have been left in there by a previous dentist. We take a two-minute break before he starts to clean out the abscess – but it could be two hours for all I know, such is my state of stunned distress. Randy croons dolefully in my ears.

When I was a small child, I fell off my bike quite spectacularly, via the simple mistake of trying to emulate not just US daredevil Evel Knievel and his stunt bike, but the plastic US daredevil Evel Knievel that you could wind up and send soaring over a dozen Matchbox lorries, as featured on Channel 4’s I Love the 50 Top Toys That You Should Not Try to Emulate. I required an immense amount of dental surgery as a result, but I cannot remember those particular times being as bad as this. I suspect my teeth have become more sensitive as I’ve got older. The session finished, I take my jacket with shaking hands and stumble from the surgery in a dull state of shock.

The road outside is noisy; market town traffic passing each way, a brewery lorry unloading. But I hear nothing. I just walk, my eyes fixed on some random point in the far distance, my mind blanker than it has ever been. I take out my mobile phone to ring the LTLP, but a passer-by looks at me very oddly and as I do not feel like talking anyway, I shove it back into my trouser pocket.

I feel utterly alone. With shock I realise that I am already sinking into negative thoughts so early in my brave battle against tooth abscess. I should do something positive. If I write to the Observer demonstrating that I can face tooth abscess with wit, good-humour and poignant humanity then they will probably give me a column in their magazine, ‘Tooth Abscess and Me’. Being the person who brings the ‘TA’ word out of the darkness of taboo and into an environment where people are not afraid to talk might be my crowning achievement in life.

‘Crowning’!

Even in my lowest hour, I can still laugh at my own very funny jokes. I rejoice in the smile that spreads across my war-torn face as I traverse the mini-roundabouts and head towards the centre of town and the pharmacy.

THREE
Return of the grievous bowls players

Past the shop, past the village pub and south, where the cottages peter out and there dwell just deer, pigs and pheasants. Across the Peddars Way, the ancient thoroughfare that brought the Romans from Suffolk to their holiday villas on the north Norfolk coast; down through the fields and woodlands of the Royal estate to the main road. Popular Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans spurs us on, playing ‘Can You Feel It’ by the Jackson 5. If there was ever a record to pump you up for a bowls match then it is ‘Can You Feel It’ by the Jackson 5.

Game one. Game on.

Unusually, we have a passenger. Karen has joined us this year, from another club. It is her very first game for us, and she will probably be intimidated and nervous. Big Andy and I put her at her ease in between funking along to the music.

‘Canyoufeeeeelit!’ I sing, indicating right.

‘It’s quite a nice green tonight, although you wouldn’t expect it right in the middle of town,’ says Big Andy.

‘And it’s directly behind the pub,’ I add. ‘Although to be frank it was a bit lively in there when we went last year. ‘Bahbahbahhhh-bahhbahbahcanyoufeeeeelit.’

‘Wasn’t there a fight or something?’ he asks.

‘I don’t think it was exactly a fight,’ I recall. ‘I think it was just a bit lively. There was lots of shouting and stuff. Certainly I remember the barmaid running in and hiding behind the door. But then it was almost…six o’clock on a Friday night.’ I slow down as we approach a roundabout. ‘Baahbahbahhhbahhhbahhhbahhh-canyoufeeeelit!’ I add.

‘Hopefully we’ll be there with a bit of time to spare,’ says Big Andy. ‘Get a quick pint before we start.’

‘Right,’ says Karen.

It is good to have a bit of new blood in the team. We struggled for players last year, after the club suffered green-uncertainty, and we had almost considered dropping out of the Thursday night league altogether. But a strong showing in the tables and our reputation for being a good-natured bunch of people have held us in good stead.

‘You might find that we take it a bit less seriously than some of your old lot,’ I call over my shoulder, as the Jackson 5 make way for the traffic report. ‘We’ve got some good players, but everybody’s there to have fun. There’s a – there’s a good atmosphere about it, is the best I can say.’

We will indeed be in good time. Park the car, go for a quick pint, get into the Zone. When you play bowls, it is very important to get into the Zone. Mental and spiritual preparation is everything.

‘A good atmosphere,’ confirms Big Andy, as we pull to a halt.

‘No we are not fucking all right,’ snarl Ron and Vicky, stepping out of their car and responding to my cheerful greeting quite alarmingly angrily. ‘He hasn’t picked us, has he? Years we’ve played for this club! Well he’s a fucking arsehole so we’ve turned up here anyway to fucking tell him so, and he can stick his fucking bowls club where it belongs.’

The Zone announces a temporary suspension and apologises for the inconvenience.

‘Right…um,’ I reply.

‘No offence to you lot, and we wish you well, but it’s time he had a piece of my mind, and I shall fucking give it to him when he arrives and it won’t be pleasant, I can tell you,’ says Vicky.

‘We’ve got the trophies from last year – he can fucking take those as well,’ adds Ron.

‘Um – perhaps we’ll go for a quick pint and leave you to it,’ suggests Big Andy.

‘Best not to interfere,’ I agree.

I see a car approaching out of the corner of my eye.

‘Here he is now,’ says Ron.

As the car pulls up, we realise that it is not Howard the club captain, but Nigel. I make frantic ‘we are going to the pub, quick quick stop the car and leap out and join us as fast as you can as there is going to be an angry scene in the car park’ gestures. But he just blinks at us in incomprehension, so we sportingly abandon him.

‘Just a little disagreement,’ explains Big Andy as we hasten away.

‘Right,’ says Karen.

I can see both sides of the quarrel. Doing the Human Resources for a small club is not a job that I would personally volunteer to do, even if I wasn’t so busy at the moment what with the stuff at home and the sorting out the band and things. It is a thankless and tiring task, and you are always likely to upset someone in the act of doing it. But I have always got on well with Ron and Vicky, having played in their block many a time. I hope it will sort itself out, somewhere else, where I won’t be involved with people shouting ‘fuck’ at other people. Big Andy clearly feels the same. We will hide bravely in the pub until the scene is over. It has always been a nice pub.

The pub is closed.

An aroma of angry dispute drifts on the air from behind us. ‘It can’t be closed!’ I moan, pulling once more at the door, ignoring the scrunch of broken glass beneath my feet.

‘It’s definitely closed,’ confirms Big Andy, stepping back from the tightly drawn blinds, the empty bottles discarded on the step, the sign on the door saying ‘This Pub is Closed’.

There are more raised voices. We stand awkwardly on the concrete slabs, thinking that perhaps a cheerful and very slightly out-of-breath publican might suddenly arrive with a key. I wander round the corner to the other side of the pub. That side of the pub is closed as well.

‘I guess we could just walk the streets for fifteen minutes?’ I wonder.

There is a small huddle of players clustered by the gate to the green as we nervously walk back with a view to sprinting around the edge of the car park and thus not getting involved in shouting and finger-poking. It transpires that the gate is locked, so we join the huddle, like refugees from the Gaza Strip. We examine our shoes as the argument approaches. They really are very interesting shoes. You can stare at them for ages without getting bored. The stitching runs all the way round, from the heel, round the toes, back to the heel again. And they keep your feet warm. Warm. And dry.

‘I’m sorry about that little scene,’ the club captain says helplessly, as his antagonists disappear in a cloud of petrol.

A greenkeeper arrives to unlock the gate. We traipse in slowly, in single file, still fixated on our shoes. The Zone hangs up a small sign: ‘This Zone is closed’.

The rules of bowls are simple.

Of course, I mean the local rules: the rules that we play by every Friday night before we go to the village pub; rules that are probably written down somewhere but that may as well be unwritten, that have been passed down by generations of Norfolk bowlers. I am sure that there are variations in different counties, in different leagues, or when you go overseas to any of the other great bowls-playing nations. But as far as I am aware, there is no Sepp Blatter of bowls; no white-capped Juan Antonio Samaranch figure passing resolutions and presiding over standardisation. I guess there is Howard, who goes to the league meetings and picks the team. Howard, or Barry Hearn.

In any case, there aren’t many rules in the big scheme of things. Not compared with cricket, or American football, or just living in general. If we assume that everybody knows the object of the game – to get as close to the cott – the little white ball – as possible, then we can dispense with that and get on to the important bits. And the most important bit comes at the very beginning of each match, before a mat has been laid or a wood tossed.

The first, undisputed law of bowls is to shake your opponent’s hand and wish him a good game.

‘Have a good game.’

‘Have a good game.’

‘And you – have a good game.’

‘Have a good game.’

‘Have a good game.’

If you are playing triples – three on each block – as is normal on Fridays, then that equates to eighteen announcements of ‘have a good game’. That is, I wish each of the three people on the opposing block a good game, and each of those three wishes one back – six ‘have a good game’s. This is repeated by the two colleagues on my side, making eighteen declarations in total before you even acknowledge your own side. That is not all, however. A ‘block’ is merely one-third of a bowls team – we play nine-a-side, three blocks playing their separate games side-by-side on different parts of the green (‘rinks’), their individual results being added together to decide the outcome of the match. That is fifty-four ‘have a good game’s resounding around the green, drifting amidst the trees and the mats and the scoreboards and echoing off the hedgerow. Often it is dark before we have finished wishing each other a good game.

And ‘have a good game’ it must be – that is the wording that is acceptable. There is no ‘good luck’; no ‘have a nice one’; no simple ‘cheers’ or ‘all the best’. ‘Have a good game’ is the phrase that is said, and has been, and always will be.

‘Have a good game.’

Cricket was my first sporting love.

Travelling with my dad to watch him play, my own small child’s kit stashed hopefully in the boot, in the wishful anticipation of one of the men suffering a horrible injury and being unable to continue. Watching my dad intently as he stood crouched like a panther in the gully; ambling around the boundary together as he waited for his turn to bat. And then – oh joy! – somebody would be too slow to move and would be hit in the nuts at silly point, and I would be called upon to substitute. And then cakes at tea, and being given cider in the pub afterwards. What could be a better way of spending a Saturday afternoon for a boy?

Then making it into the team, and running around, and batting and bowling, and buying cider in the pub afterwards. And playing with your dad, and discovering rock music, and skipping the odd game because of band practice, and leaving before the cider to go drinking with your new friends, and not having so much time on Saturdays to do stuff with your dad, and…

I think I am a bit fat to play cricket these days. I did give it a go again a couple of years back, but I was really only still good at the cider bit, and after a while I became aware of small boys lurking around the ground, regarding me as a dead-cert nuts casualty. It was fun, but I don’t miss it. That was then and this is now.

Football was never my thing. I did play at a reasonably high level, for the 3rd Billericay cub troop. My position was left back, which, as my dad explained to me, was probably the most important position on the field. Unfortunately, none of the other cubs realised this, and they used to shout things like ‘Haha – left back in the changing room, more like! Left back! Left back in the changing room!’ I didn’t move on to another club when I left the cubs. My fellow players eventually went on to become people in the City with aggressive suits and wanky spectacles and too much testosterone. They were happy times.

Tennis half-killed me, and I was never built for rugby, so now it’s just a bit of snooker, with John Twonil, Mick and Short Tony and the gang – and the bowls. I wonder what would have happened had I discovered bowls at a very early age? There are probably hundreds of thousands of small boys who have never had a chance to play; never seen a bowling green. It is a shame, and the reason why Barry Hearn must succeed.

Triples – three on a block. Each has a specific role: the ‘skip’, the ‘lead’, who bowls first, and the one who bowls second/in the middle, who does not have a particularly satisfactory title.

The first thing that you’ll not appreciate on Barry Hearn’s television coverage is this: when you step forward to bowl, you can’t really see what’s happening at the other end – the ‘head’ of woods that collect around the cott. It is too far away, and difficult to judge distances between the woods. This is the role of the skipper – to stand by the head, making judgements about the position of each wood and letting you know what’s going on via a combination of words and gestures. These will include his recommendation on what would be the best shot to try in the circumstances. Sometimes this is a gentle suggestion, sometimes a barked order followed up with ‘Oh well – do it your own fucking way then.’ Skips have different styles.